“Peasant Da Vincis&#8221

In the Chinese countryside there is a curious tradition of building wildly ambitious engineering projects without the remotest practical value. Anhui province, for instance, does not abut the ocean, but that did not stop Anhui farmer Li Yuming from designing and building a submarine that he named Twilight No. 1. Over the years, I’ve read small news items in the papers about similarly earnest undertakings, including helicopters, biplanes, robots, and so on. I’ve always thought they are a good antidote to the joyless image of the unyielding pragmatism of the Chinese.

Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese artist who has a studio in New York, became especially interested in these projects when he stumbled on Li Yuming’s submarine. “I struck up contact with him and, during the Chinese New Year Holiday in 2005, acquired the submarine, the very first piece by a peasant in my collection.” Now, Cai has put together an exhibit of these creations at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai to coincide with the World Expo. They are, he says, “a counterpoint to the Expo’s many upscale national pavilions” and a reminder of the “hundreds of millions of peasants who have paid the price for the construction of modern society and better urban life in the reform era.” Cai’s website has a video and further information.

Among the machines on display in Shanghai is Du Wenda’s flying saucer, which he modelled after something he saw in a science-fiction magazine.

Cai says: “The line inscribed on the large wall below the flying saucer on the roof, ‘Never learned how to land,’ derives from Du Wenda’s sole concern of getting the saucer into the air, and placed here, it suggests anxiety over the rapid development of Chinese society.”

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.